Free-For-All Friday
Jul. 18th, 2025 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Time for free for all Friday, a day for random chit-chat!
Do you want to talk about the other novels you are reading or find a read-along partner? Practice your Chinese? Request for fics? Ask for beta readers? Just talk about your day?
Go right ahead!
... Since I completely forgot the Read-in-Progress post this week, this doubles as a Read-in-Progress too if you wish!
Do you want to talk about the other novels you are reading or find a read-along partner? Practice your Chinese? Request for fics? Ask for beta readers? Just talk about your day?
Go right ahead!
... Since I completely forgot the Read-in-Progress post this week, this doubles as a Read-in-Progress too if you wish!
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Date: 2025-07-18 03:33 pm (UTC)But that's not a c-novel. What is, is Goodbye My Princess, which I can only borrow in around... *checks app* omg, two weeks?! It was 8 weeks last I checked so this is great news. I've heard a lot of good things about the translation quality so I'm really looking forward to it!
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Date: 2025-07-18 04:08 pm (UTC)First was Apocalypse Lord, a lit-RPG adventure (of the isekai’d-into-a-video-game variety) with a female MC. Spoiler: She succeeds because a) she took part in the game’s closed beta, b) she’s a tank who dumps all points into stamina/HP, and c) as one character eventually realizes, while everyone else treats this as a monster-killing survival game, she instead is playing a resource-management sim ftw. Not great, but not time wasted. Length: about 40% of Journey to the West.
Next was the opening 30 chapters of Seeking Immortality in Vain, and I a) really liked it and b) really hated that I started it despite knowing it’s in progress. I hate reading unfinished stories, haaaaaaate it. (Yes, there are more chapters up now, but I’m not touching them till we get closure, dammit.)
Then while traveling, I returned to Gourmet of Another World, a long-ass comedy xianxia, over 7 times the length of Journey to the West. I was about 60% through, mumble-mumble months ago, when I got derailed onto something else. So while passing time in planes, trains, and hostels, I gobbled down a couple hundred chapters, putting me to 74% through per my ereader (almost a full Journey West of text). That “gobbled” is deliberate: the MC is a culinary cultivator, and the first half of the story, most battles are martial arts cooking competitions — eventually the MC levels up enough to cook combat food. (It is extra humiliating to a cultivator to be defeated in combat by an explosive meatball.) Very fun, and funny.
And I’ve just started The Dragon by Taiyang Jun (don’t know why the author’s name 太阳菌 gets romanized as Tai Yangjun—太阳 is sunlight, and 菌 is mushroom) (also, the original title is 见龙, "meeting the dragon"), a baihe xianxia that looks promising.
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Date: 2025-07-18 04:55 pm (UTC)Gourmet of Another World sounds fun!
I really want to check out The Dragon at some point, but annoyingly I think the only translation is MTL.
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Date: 2025-07-18 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-07-18 06:21 pm (UTC)Ah — missed that. The editing is good enough I couldn’t tell.
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Date: 2025-07-19 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-23 04:23 pm (UTC)They are pretty much shounen battle tournament type anime anyway, but just make it cooking.
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Date: 2025-07-23 06:38 pm (UTC)Pretty much! Only with xianxia power-leveling.
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Date: 2025-07-24 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-24 02:48 pm (UTC)They're very aligned, though Apocalypse Lord has a lighter tone (despite its extreme casualty rates, almost as high as Dungeon Crawler Carl).
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Date: 2025-07-24 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-18 04:35 pm (UTC)In the first: Highlight for spoilers! *I liked finding out a bit more of original!Lup Qingci’s history (and why she spared Ruan Li originally)! I also loved Ruan Li realizing what Luo Qingci has done for her sake! Ruan Li thinking about how Luo Qingci can’t take her reverse scale because she’s already given it to Chi Qing both kinda amused me and makes me a bit apprehensive of Ruan Li's reaction if/when she discovers Chi Qing isLuo Qingci.*.
In the second: Highlight for spoilers! *Politcal plotting coninues (involing a false Jiang Mingyou) and ir tooks like Song Juguang and Jiang Changbai might have a conversation about the latter avoiding the former.*.
w/r/t non-cnovel stuff, I'm rereading The Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jones. It's a fantasy novel (with a side of f/f romance) set in an early 19th century era Ruitanian-ish country. imho this is faster paced than the first in the series and I'm enjoying Antuniet as a protagonist.
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Date: 2025-07-20 08:12 am (UTC)Otherwise I've mostly been (re)reading poetry—Andrea Gibson's in honor of their passing, and Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta whose collection I've been going through since... May.
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Date: 2025-07-23 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-20 11:49 am (UTC)Currently reading I Made the Top Star (我捧红了顶级流量[穿书]), also by Su Huai Huang. This one is a "transmigrated into a bleak, depressing entertainment industry novel" from the perspective of a top-tier talent agent-turned cannon fodder. The love interest is the actual main character of the say novel, but the MC doesn't know that.
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